Mike Celizic

It is the height of arrogance to tell somebody that he shouldn’t have taken a job that pays $24 million for four years, so I’m not going to tell Mike D’Antoni that he should have turned down the New York Knicks’ most generous offer for his services.

Just the same, I give D’Antoni until December, two months into the 2008-09 season, before he starts wondering what he was thinking when he signed on. I think I’m being generous with that prediction. It’s just as likely D’Antoni will realize in training camp what an impossible job he has.

He’s a high-profile guy, a former coach of the year and a man who favors an up-tempo, high-scoring, crowd-pleasing style of play.

And most of that is the opposite of what the Knicks need. For starters, why would Knicks owner Jim Dolan care how well-known his new coach is? He needs players who can win, not a coach who’s recognized on the streets of Memphis. Then there’s the nature of the team D’Antoni is inheriting: it stinks.

D’Antoni had a lot of success in Phoenix with two-time MVP Steve Nash running the offense. In New York, he’s going to have Stephon Marbury, one of the game’s all-time knuckleheads running the offense. Marbury is an outstanding athlete and a pretty good guy — he does tend to get whiny when things don’t go his way — but he has never understood how to play basketball.

Then there’s forward Eddy Curry, who isn’t ever going to be mistaken for Amare Stoudemire. And backup point guard Nate Robinson, who makes up in lack of production for what he lacks in size. There’s also forward Zach Randolph, a pretty good player but one who had legal problems when he was with Portland.

Then there’s the question of exactly what D’Antoni is supposed to do with the Knicks. He’s an offensive guru who admitted to spending less time than he could have working on defense. The Knicks are a team that scored 97 points and gave up 104 per game. They need defense. Instead, Dolan hired offense.

I understand D’Antoni’s thinking in taking the job. He could have signed with the Bulls, but Chicago actually has aspirations of becoming a contender, and the job would come with a lot of pressure to do things that can’t be done. The Knicks, though, have aspirations merely of being competent. Right now, they’d be happy to win 37 games and be the last team in the playoffs — just enough to keep the Garden full of fans willing to pay exorbitant prices to see a team that can win almost as much as it loses.

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Given that the team is coming off its worst year ever, it won’t take much to improve. And let’s face it. After the twin disasters that were Isiah Thomas and Larry Brown, it won’t take much to improve the quality of basketball in Madison Square Garden. Dolan has shown that his expectations aren’t set all that high. He put up with Thomas for two years of lousy coaching and four years of lousy management.

So if D’Antoni can go from the Suns, where nothing but a title was going to be good enough, to the Big Apple, where almost anything is an improvement, it’s got to look good to him.

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What he doesn’t understand is how nasty things can get in New York when he finds that he can’t do a lot better with the horribly constructed team he’s getting than Thomas and Brown did. The New York media has no mercy, and he’s working with players who are known to go to the writers to whisper their dissatisfaction with the way the coach is doing things. And if Marbury decides he’s unhappy — a common occurrence the past couple of years — things will get just as ugly as they have been for far too long.

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